The world is growing gentle, But few know what she owes To the understanding lily And the judgment of the rose.

Said the tiger to the lily, Said the viper to the rose, Let us marry so our children May attain the double pose.

With a feline half a flower — With the attar in the asp We could institute a slaughter That would make a planet gasp.

"Proposals"

The world is growing gentle, But few know what she owes To the understanding lily And the judgment of the rose.

"Proposals"

The rose has told In one simplicity. That never life Relinquishes a bloom But to bestow An ancient confidence.

Treating the sword blade the same as the staff, Turning the chariot wheel into chaff. Toppling a pillar and nudging a wall, Building a sand pile to counter each fall. Yielding to nothing — not even the rose, The dust has its reasons wherever it goes.

"The Dust"

Oh, we have had great lovers that we followed to the pyre; Our boasts out-do the Sabine girls—the Mosque of St. Sophia. And we are very sure of ours, for when a city falls, They seize us and they love us and they hurl us from the walls.

"Our Lovers"

He found the harem filled with rocking maids Surrendered to the orgies of the sob.

"Tadmore"

Great is the rose That challenges the crypt, And quotes milleniums Against the grave.

Great is the rose Infected by the tomb, Yet burgeoning Indifferent to death.

"Tadmore"

The rose has told In one simplicity. That never life Relinquishes a bloom But to bestow An ancient confidence.

"Tadmore"

The gods released a vision on a world forespent and dull; They sent it as a challenge by the sea hawk and the gull.

Great is the rose That challenges the crypt, And quotes milleniums Against the grave.

A year ago, to a startled public, was revealed the most extraordinary prodigy of them all — Nathalia Crane, 11-year-old poet, "The Baby Browning of Brooklyn," whose first volume of verse, The Janitor's Boy, was heralded by critics to be a work of genius. Such words as "blastoderm", "sindoc," "peris," "parasang," "sarcenet," "teazel," "nullah," "cantatrice," "barracan," "sistrum," writhed and hissed in her verses. One poem began with the nebular hypothesis and ended with prohibition; others cantered with a Eugene Fieldian humor; still others coldly glowed with the passion-weary detachment of a woman who has had her fill of life and its motley follies. Critic-Poet Louis Untermeyer chortled with elation. Poet William Rose Benét wrote a preface. The English Society of Authors and Playwrights (of which Thomas Hardy is President) asked Nathalia Crane to join them.

It seems impossible to me that a girl so immature could have written these poems. They are beyond the powers of a girl of twelve. The sophisticated viewpoint of sex … knowledge of history and archeology found in these pages place them beyond the reach of any juvenile mind.

Nathalia sort of sings her poems to herself — they come into being that way. She reads Kipling constantly, and Conan Doyle is her favorite. The only poet she likes is Longfellow, but she doesn't enthuse over him. She likes wild, imaginative tales. When she finds a word she likes or doesn't understand, she looks it up in every available dictionary and studies every possible meaning and use for it...

Crane's father, as quoted in TIME magazine (23 November 1925)

Nathalia can explain practically every line she has ever written; I have heard her uncertain treble clarify passages that have puzzled erudite authors. No poet that ever lived delighted in amassing such curious, half-forgotten sounds; not even Francis Thompson had so great a vocabulary of rare and archaic terms. . . Nathalia collects words the way a boy of her age collects postage stamps; she had thumbed Noah Webster's work (in various editions) and made a glossary of her own. The dictionary is her playbox and she knows exactly where every odd toy is concealed.

Some of the critics explained the work by insisting that the child was some sort of medium, an instrument unaware of what was played upon it; others, considering the book a hoax, scorned the fact that any child could have written verses so smooth in execution and so remarkable in spiritual overtones. … The appeal of such lines is not that they have been written by a child but by a poet.

I remember that Bob had bought several books during the trip, and they were in sight. One was a collection of verse by a talented child named Nathalia Crane, then making a sizable splash in the American literary world.

Harold Preece commenting about Robert E. Howard's regard for Crane's poetry in The Last Celt: A Bio-Bibliography of Robert E. Howard (1976) by Glenn Lord p. 95